Rania Matar
Born and raised in Lebanon Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA, Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums.
A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University (upcoming this spring).
Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award, 2008 ICA/Boston Foster Prize. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC.
She curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran, Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. 2025
Matar published five books:
Where Do I Go? 2026; SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009
Links to her work
- Rania’s website
- Rania’s Instagram
- Rania’s Facebook
- Cornell Fine Arts Museum: “Rania Matar: On Either Side of the Window, Portraits During COVID-19”
- ICA/Boston: “The Artist’s Voice: Rania Matar”
- Minneapolis Institute of Art: “Talk - From the Individual to the Collective: The Photography of Rania Matar”
- Wallpaper Magazine: “Photographer Rania Matar offers a window on the world during quarantine”
- Misstropolis: “Rania Matar's Portraiture of Resiliency and Promise”
- The Cleveland Museum of Art: “In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar”